John Bolton’s Appointment Signals the End of the American Century

Bolton’s appointment has come when the US is trying to come to terms with the unsustainability of its three-quarter century hegemony over the modern world.

In his 14 months at the White House, Donald Trump has administered several shocks to the Americanpublic. But none has been as severe as his appointment of John R. Bolton as the national security advisor. Bolton is known as one of the most radically hawkish voices in American foreign policy.He was a member of the American Enterprise Institutegroup that coached George W. Bush on foreign policy before he was elected, andthen pushed him into invading and destroying Iraq.

In recent years, he has urged thatthe US declare war on both North Koreaand Iran. It is no surprise then that Wendy Sherman has described him as a man who “has never met a war he didn’t want”.

President Trump has hired and fired 60 people from top jobs in his administration in the past 14 months, so placing bets on Bolton’s longevity could be risky. But the appointment of such a man to a post that, more than any other in the US government, determines whether the country gets embroiled in another war or not,could not have come at a worsetime for it has come when the US is trying to come to terms with the unsustainability ofits three-quarter century hegemony over the modern world, and does not know which way to turn. It is at such moments that the possibility of a military conflict, i.e. a war, reaches a peak.

Hegemony must not be confused with dominance. The latter can be achieved through the exercise of military power alone. Hegemony, by contrast, is control, exercised without, or at best with a minimal,use of force. Subordinate countries then follow the hegemon’s lead because its restraint convinces them that it will use force wisely, and only as a last resort.

The US enjoyed this hegemony when it was being openly confronted by the Soviet Union but, paradoxically, began to lose it within monthsof the USSR’s collapse at a time when, in President Clinton’s words, Americansdid not have“a single over-riding threat to their sovereignty”. The decline began, almost unnoticed, in1994 whenClinton declared that the USno longer felt itself bound by the UN Security Council’s resolutions on Iraq and would notpermit the lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq so long asSaddam Hussein remained in power. This was the beginning of its destruction of the United Nations and its attempt to replace the Westphalian international order enshrined in its Charter, with one that was fashioned by it in its own image.

Since then, the covert or overt use of force to secure regime change has become the central tenet of American foreign policy. This was demonstrated by its unprovokedcarpet-bombingof Iraq in 1998, its aerial invasion of Serbia to ‘liberate’Kosovo 1999 andthe invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Post US invasion, Iraq became a breeding ground for Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Credit: Reuters

For none of these actions did the US seek, let alone obtain, even a token nod from the UN Security Council.Its hegemony couldhave survived ifanythinggood had resulted from them. But Iraq has emerged as a frail, poor and unstable country riven with sectarian strife, and a breeding ground for al-Qaeda and ISIS. Kosovo is a trans-shipment centre for drugs destined from Afghanistan to Europe; andhaving had no compellingreason for declaring war on Iraq and Afghanistan, theUS found itself unable to end them for years on end.

It, therefore, lost close to 7,000soldiers, crippled another 60,000,traumatised a quarter of a million, spent trillions of dollars and ran up a national debt of nearly $20 trillion, while its infrastructure mouldered awayand its cities began to resemble those of the Third World.

Butnone of this dented the huge sense of entitlement the US had inherited from its victory in the Cold War.Liberal interventionism therefore revived with a bang with the advent of the so-called Arab Spring.In 2011, Obamajoined France and Britainin a disastrous destruction of Libya. In the same year heallowed Qatar, Turkey andSaudi Arabia to drag the USinto an equally misguidedattack on Syria.

As in the first round of militaryintervention, theUN Security Council was first misled and then excluded againfrom decision-making on war and peace.But the resemblancebetween these and the first round of American interventions ends there.

First, the US is no longer willing, or indeed able, to shoulder the burden of intervention alone. Instead, itcreated a more broad-based ‘transatlantic’coalitionto undertake its‘humanitarian’ interventions.Its favoured instrument is NATO,which provides a sufficiently wide umbrella of consensusto sustain the illusion of multilateralism, but is flexible enough to allow every member to decide the level of its involvement.

Second,responding to the profound aversion of the American public to the loss of American lives in places they cannot identify on a map, the Obama administration became determined not to send American troops into combat again. To avoid any further unnecessary entanglements, Obamaplaced an ever increasing reliance upon diplomacy to contain potential threats.Iran, Cuba and the containment of China were his major successes.Butthe benevolent impact of this upon public perception in smaller nationshas beenoffset by the US’sincreasing reliance on drones to wage its never-ending“war on terror”.

Machines have no feelings, so the target groupscannot negotiate with them, cannot surrender to them, cannot even fight them.So drone warfareleaves no room for a hegemonistic relationship. Engaging in it is a tacit abandonment of the quest forhegemony and a conscious decision to rule the world through terror alone.

It is thefinal differencethat has given the coup-de grace to the American Century.The US is now too broke tofinance its interventions by itself, so it has begun to pass the hat around. Supposedly it does so only among its allies. Butthemain financiers with whom the CIA teamed up to arm the insurgents inLibya and Syria have been precisely the countries that had the most to gain fromtoppling the existing regimes in them – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates of the Persian Gulf. This has turned the US into a new kind of mercenary – a state that is available for hire.

No man, and therefore no state, can be both ruler and vassal at the same time. Therefore, when the US began to fight wars with other peoples’ money, the American Century became history. No one has taken a greater delight in rubbing this in than the US’s staunchest ally, Benjamin Netanyahuof Israel. Netanyahu attacked Obama on American television in June 2014for deciding to cooperate with Iran in halting the ISIS’s advance into Iraq, and went uninvitedto the US anddenounced the American president before theUS Congress on American soil for craftinga nuclear agreement with Iran.

Former US President Barack Obama (R) meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House
in Washington October 1, 20

The US’s loss of hegemony is only one part of the story. The other part is the West’s loss of moral hegemony in the post-Cold War years. The US and its allieshave justified the assaults on Iraq, Libya and Syria by depicting their rulers as tyrants. Removing them would open the way for a transition to democracy. But whatthey chose tooverlookwas thatthe freedom to vote is not an end in itself, but only themeans for securing other ends. These are thefreedom to think, speak and write, freedom to worship and freedom from gender discrimination.

The states the West destroyedwere modern stateswith high rates ofliteracy andwomen’s participation in the workforce, striving to be secular and gender neutral. Their authoritarianism wasdesigned not to prolong but to root outobscurantism,tribalism and religious extremism in their own countries.

By the yardstick of the ends democracy is intended to serve, the assaults onIraq, Libya and Syria are morally indefensible for they have eliminated the very freedoms that they were supposed to bestow.It is not surprising therefore that the power vacuum their destruction has created has beenfilled not by democracy but by al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The sudden spateof terrorism and the rebirth of crude nationalism in the heart of Europe is a direct consequence. Brexit is its most flagrant example. But similar racist-nationalist impulses have sprung up in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria. A new wave of home-grown terrorism is sweeping across Europe. An unwantedflood of immigrants, in large part caused by the wars unleashed by the West, has triggered aresurgence of racist nationalism in Europe.

An unwanted flood of immigrants, in large part caused by the wars unleashed by the
West, has triggered a resurgence of racist nationalism in Europe. Credit: Reuters

Ascountry after country has been convulsed by these challenges,people have begun to turn tostrong leaders like Putin, Erdogan,Xi Jinping, Duterte and Narendra Modi, to preserve the essential security without which their world willturn into a living hell. But the more authoritarian that a regime becomes,the greater is the insecurity itsleaders feel. The stronger, therefore, becomes the temptation to focus the public’s attention on real or imaginedexternal threats.

It is in such conditions thatdeclining, but still dominant,regimeshave sought a solution to their domestic problems, in small, manageable, wars.The Habsburg empire found itself in such asituation attheclose of the nineteenth century, and the first decade of the 20th century.In 1914, it tried to tame its fractious minorities by invading Serbia, where an extreme nationalist group had succeeded in assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Hapsburg throne. It ended by triggering its own complete destruction and the First World War.

Sixty-five years later,theSoviet Union, which was similarly caught in a cycle of irresistible economic decline, sought to reinforce its hegemony over the Warsaw Pact countriesthrough a limited military intervention in Afghanistan.It ended by getting enmeshed in a decade-long war it could not win, and brought aboutits own demise.

The US and Europeare facinga similar crisis today, andsuccumbing to a similar temptation to contain it by highlighting external threats. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have been elected as the villains. Russia has to be punished for illegally wresting Crimea from Ukraine, for propping up the Assad regime in Syria, for intervening in the US elections to ensure the victory of Trump, and most recently for the attempted assassination of a former Russian agent, Sergei Skripal on British soil.

North Korea has to be punished for continually violating its obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and daring to develop missiles that can carry nuclear warheads to the American mainland. China has to be punished for trying to extend its control over the South China Sea in violation of the 12-mile limit enshrined inthe UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.Iran has to be punished for just being Iran.

Economic sanctions have been imposed on Russia, and further strengthened on North Korea. Trump is threatening to resile from thenuclear treaty with Iranand not liftthe UN sanctionsthat the US and EU are committed to removing. And he has imposed tariffs on imports, mainly aimed at China, that are on the brink of triggering a trade war.

A joint American, Japanese and, regrettably, Indiannaval task force hassteamed through the length and breadth of the South China Seafor monthsto enforce the freedom of militarynavigation outside the 12-mile limit.

Trump has threatened to obliterateNorth Koreaand sent a submarine, followed by an American task forcearmed with thousands of Tomahawk missiles to underline his threat.

Britain’s shaky Prime Minister Theresa May has not only expelled scores of Russians from the UKin retaliation for the killing of Skripal (which she has a sovereign right to do) but invoked the treaty obligations imposed byNATO upon its members to persuade them to do the same.

It was a similar invocation of treaty obligations that made Russia back Serbia, Germany back Austria, and Britain and France back Russia and Serbia in 1914, andstart a war that none of themwanted, but killed nearly 20 million people and ended monarchical rule in Europe. Russia’s warning toBritain, and by implication NATO,not to‘play with fire’ is therefore a reminder not to repeat the mistakes of history.

It is into this maelstrom that Trump has dropped Bolton, a self-avowed apostle of war.

About

Hi, my name is Prem Shankar Jha. I am a journalist and author based in New Delhi, India.
In the last decade I have become more and more concerned about where the world is heading and I am curious to explore interactive formats with you in order to share views and concerns.
Please do not hesitate to be in touch.